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An event will be held by AT&T and Autism Speaks next week to create applications for people with autism that leverage AT&T's mobile-health platform and ideas crowdsourced from Autism Speaks' Facebook page. The apps will be organized into four categories: adult, school-aged, nonverbal and verbal. A total of $20,000 will be given by AT&T to four teams with the best apps.

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An AT&T "hackathon" over the weekend asked developers to come up with mobile applications to help disabled people. "Our interest in hackathons in general is that we believe that collaboration is a big part of fostering innovation," says AT&T's Carlton Hill. Apps at previous hackathons aimed to stop drivers from texting and to encourage children to read.

AT&T's new developer tools include a beta Call Management application programming interface that allows phone numbers to be used across devices, as well as an Alpha API program to encourage third-party developers to submit ideas. At AT&T's developer conference, Ruggero Scorcioni won a hackathon for an app that reads brainwaves to determine if a person talking on a cellphone would mind being interrupted by another call and handles it accordingly.

AT&T this week introduced a beta version of a service aimed at helping developers of mobile-health applications connect their software to other medical technologies and tap into data sets available to them. The carrier said its AT&T Developer Center ForHealth would streamline and reduce the cost of getting mobile-health apps to market. "This will enable developers to create mashup applications and umbrella applications," said Eleanor Chye of AT&T Business Solutions.

Some members of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network are criticizing a decision by President Barack Obama to appoint Peter Bell, Autism Speaks' executive vice president of programs and services, to the President's Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities. They say Bell is "anti-vaccine" and cite his former role as head of the group Cure Autism Now as an area of concern. Others, including officials with Autism Speaks, support Bell's appointment, and federal officials say they will stand by the decision.

While the mobile-health industry is growing worldwide, it must first overcome some challenges before it can become mainstream, an expert from the mHealth Initiative said. Speaking at a conference, Claudia Tessier cited information management, security and privacy as some of the issues that need to be addressed in order for mobile health to spur big changes in health care.